some things you may have missed

Menu

generation x

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the next generation will be criticised by the generation that immediately precedes them. You heard it from your grandparents most probably – the repeated complained comparison about what it was like ‘when we were young’. How exams were harder, jobs were more scarce, world wars more likely.

The current generation to be on the receiving end of this is the millenial generation. Roughly speaking, these are the people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. The perceived truth is that this a generation that has never had it so easy – technology, healthcare, no conscription, travel, and so much besides, are all more free for them than for their forbears. Thus criticisms come – of a snowflake generation in desperate need of safe spaces, scared of giving offence and easy to offend. You can’t move on Facebook for memes about how easy they have it, and how despairing my generation (Generation X) or the one above (Baby boomers) are. It’s no wonder that they are leaving Facebook in droves or just not signing up for it; it’s not a safe space.

Whether it’s true to say, or whether it’s a perception bought about by social media, it seems that the millenials may be the most criticised generation in history. It would be nice to be able to say that Christians were showing a different way – more encouraging, more kind, more willing to see the good. And I’m sure that some are; but by and large what I see and hear from Christians my age and older is much the same as what I see and hear from those outside the church – complaint and criticism. If it’s little wonder, then, that millenials are leaving Facebook, then it shouldn’t surprise us that they’re also largely absent from our churches. Now this is a complex issue – I’m not suggesting that inter-generational criticism is the only reason that millenials are not in church with us; but it seems to me that it is one of the reasons. Would you want to go to a church if it was full of people who regularly and loudly criticised you or people like you? Of course not; history shows us that where this happens, people leave church and don’t come back – or start their own expression of it.

We all need to be called out on stuff every now and then; we all need wiser heads to come alongside us and help us take a good, long look at ourselves. But we all know that people win the right to do that if they have first spent a good time being with us, knowing us, loving us. You don’t just walk up to someone you’ve never met and tell them they’re weak (at least I hope you don’t … ); no. You build a relationship, you point out what’s good about them – and you do that a lot; then eventually you find you have won the right to say “Have you ever thought about … ?”

I see much that’s good in this generation. This is the generation, after all, that’s willing to walk out of school to protest the right to attend school without the fear of getting shot; this is the generation willing to run with #metoo; this is the generation of Malala Yousafzai, for goodness sake. Of course, there are things to criticise, as there are in every generation. It would be better, though, if people my age and older were more willing to listen, more able to confess their own failings and help those that follow us learn from our own mistakes; it would be wonderful if our churches saw the stirrings of faith and courage coming from the younger end of the spectrum and gave space to them to flower and flame into life; that we were humble enough to learn, slow to speak, quick to listen.

After all, it’s written somewhere that a little child shall lead them.